The Help: bringing Stockett’s book to the big screen

Allison Janney (Charlotte Phelan ) and Emma Stone (Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan) in a still photo from The Help, due to be released in August.

According to reports from Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly, the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling debut novel, The Help, is being shot in Greenwood, Mississippi with an all-star cast.

That cast, which gathers three generations of top-rate American actresses, includes:

Emma Stone: Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan

Viola Davis: Aibileen

Octavia Spencer: Minny

Allison Janney: Charlotte Phelan

Bryce Dallas Howard: Hilly

Sissy Spacek: Missus Walters

Dana Ivey: Grace Higginbotham

Cicely Tyson: Constantine Jefferson

The Help spent close to a year and a half on all the major best-seller lists. Despite that, I am probably the only person in America who hasn’t read it. I should be arrested by the literary police.

Everyone I trust as a reader likes The Help, but it’s been sitting on my bookshelf taunting me for nearly two years. (Almost to the day, in fact. The original pub. date is Feb. 10, 2009.) In fact, it’s languishing just to the right of 3 other books I haven’t but really should have read: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

Triple shame, I know.

There’s no way I’ll get to the Larsson books. The film versions have already started to arrive, which kills my incentive to read them. Plus, there are three of them. Three books is a lot more than one.